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Trust me, we’ve all been there. I’m now a recovered insomniac for 4 years now, and I sleep great!
Just a spoiler alert, insomniac isn’t a disease or a condition. It’s just a phobia, in a nutshell. A fear of not sleeping or not sleeping well. And phobias are often overcome by, this might seem unnatural to you, more exposure to the irritant. In this case, having more insomnia to beat insomnia. Sounds twisted at first, but once you come out on the other side, you’ll understand more of the process. A fear of not sleeping is not only irrational, but unwarranted, you were sleeping as a baby, everyone knows how to do it without requiring any learned trade or skill as it is completely natural. The only reasons most people don’t sleep are because, their bodies just aren’t sleepy at that point in time OR, they’re too worked up with excitement or anxiety, in this case, people are simply losing sleep over sleep. The good news is that both conditions are temporary and reversible.
For now, just go to and out of bed at your regular times, and yes, allow yourself to feel sick to the stomach along with rapid heart rate, sweaty palms etc, expect these to happen every night or at any time of the day but I advise you to keep yourself busy with other things, acknowledge these thoughts but do nothing about them and allow yourself to feel these emotions without judgement, don’t blame yourself, and eventually they will come to pass and happen less frequently as time goes on. The ultimate goal is feeling and being okay with sleeplessness or whenever your mind keeps warning you about it. Good luck to you and wishing you a speedy recovery.
Without doing a sleep study, it is impossible to know what kind of sleep you had. Want to know the best remedy for getting the best sleep? Do nothing, Expect nothing and try to Think nothing. Your body knows what kind of sleep it needs and it knows how to get it. Your job is just to set the right conditions for it, winding down close to bedtime, a good sleeping environment and most importantly, a consistent bedtime schedule. That’s all. Good luck.
Hello @asthut!
Welcome to this forum. That’s something we as former insomniacs get used to and eventually get better and better at letting go. We get less and less motivated to respond to such thoughts anymore. To the point that I actually find it comical when I observe my own brain trying to fear-monger me like before that I now interpret as my over-protective mind pinging me with useless crap.
You’ll find your own way to deal with it, everyone does. But the common theme is people just get over that fear and no longer let it consume them. Good luck to you.
Do nothing. Learn to ignore it. The problem of insomnia is you defined it into existence, from being non-existent, literally. So it is really a product of your own mind.
Learn to accept whatever sleep your body gives you, there is no right or wrong, whatever your body gets is always the right one. Good luck.
Best wishes to you! But sleep isn’t something you need to work on as it’s natural and already innate in everyone
Hello @lora
When insomniacs said they recover, it means they no longer let their insomnia urges or obsessive thoughts bother them. That’s when they have truly become free from these attachments, that they have discovered true and complete liberation. It’s hard to explain to you when your head is so wrapped up around these thoughts about sleep. I advise you to take it one step at a time, whenever a sleep thought creeps up to you, you find a way to just let it go. Like leaves dropping into a stream or river, just letting the water carry them away. Over time, you will get better and better at letting go. Eventually, you achieve complete liberation when you break free from all kinds of notions. Essentially, you just realize that these are just notions or ideas inside your head and you can adjust your level of response to them.
Your body’s ability to sleep operates on a whole new different level by itself regardless of thoughts and your attempts at intervening have been completely unnecessary. You recover in the sense that you just don’t feel the need or urge to control them anymore. It’s like if you know you have no problems walking and there’s nothing wrong with your feet, there’s no need to keep walking just to prove to yourself you can walk! Now you’d rather just sit instead. And essentially that’s what you are trying to do every night when you self-identify as an insomniac, trying desperately to prove to yourself you can sleep until it becomes a daily mental struggle. When you’ve recovered, you just don’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore, you become as welcoming to sleeplessness as much as sleepiness, because you are fine with either outcome. Good luck and I hope you find your liberation soon.
Hello. I don’t think you should adjust your sleep window at all because it is already the minimum. Just continue what you are doing, temporary setbacks are very common especially when you start making changes like adjusting your sleep medications and don’t let these discourage you. Part of the recovery is to remain strong, steadfast and disciplined and to perservere even in the face of adversity. Good luck to you and I hope you find recovery soon.
Hello. The key to defeating insomnia ironically is in not trying to defeat it. Be accepting of wakeful hours as much as enjoying a restful sleep. It means you lose your discriminative nature and truly embrace an “any scenario is fine”. Aspiring to reach such a state isn’t easy to be honest, it may mean doing things that seem unnatural to you at first, but with faith and optimism, it works! In sleep and indeed in life, freeing yourself from harmful self-defined notions such as “sleep is very important to me” or “i must get x hours every single night” etc, usually and ultimately leads to a cessation of suffering. Good luck.
Hi @TraciD
So glad to hear you are doing really well. Please thank yourself first! You are the one who made all this possible. As long as anyone don’t make sleeplessness an enemy, or actively try to avoid it, they will do very well in leaving behind the mental struggle with insomnia. Good luck to you and best wishes.
Hello Ruby!
Thank you for sharing your inspiring story. And yes, I still remember your earlier posts when you had a lot of questions and worries which seemed so scary then, well what a difference of night and day, and they do seem so insignificant now, don’t they? But ultimately, if you ask the same questions today, do you think you have the answers now? Or do you feel like even if you have the right answers, they don’t really matter anymore and therefore asking them isn’t so important after all… And this is exactly where aspiring recovering insomniacs should strive to achieve, an attitude of nonchalance and indifference. Whatever worries or the thousands of questions anyone who suffers from insomnia have, the ultimate remedy is to learn to be undaunted by them, to let them somehow just sink into the back of your mind into oblivion because you know and understand sleep so much better now, that it was never in your control in the first place and your worries had been unsubstantiated and unnecessary after all. I might say it has been a hoax all along.
Congratulations on your recovery and good luck! As long as you don’t fret over the occasional bouts of sleeplessness which EVERYONE will get, including good sleepers, you will continue to do very well indeed.
Hello!
I am no expert but I can tell you there is no need for any reason why anyone can’t sleep well. And there is no need to keep finding one until you are satisfied you found the “root” of your sleep problem and have taken steps to isolate it that it no longer bothers you and you can return to your blissful sleep forever, whenever and wherever. Well life doesn’t work like that! There are always ups and downs and you should expect your sleep to be like that as well. In fact, engaging in such fault-finding exercises is mentally stimulating enough to keep sleep at bay!
Perhaps it would be better to focus on your life instead of making sleep the center of everything in your life. Sleep doesn’t define who you really are or what you are capable of. And certainly, don’t make it get in the way of the lifestyle you want to live and the joy you could get out of it. Nobody lives forever, which means everyone will get their sleep in unlimited amounts at some point, so why miss it so badly now? On their deathbeds, what will people prefer to remember about their lives: how they’ve lived OR how miserable their lives have become BECAUSE they couldn’t sleep well, based on whatever criteria about sleep that they have unnecessarily imposed upon themselves? The choice is really up to you.
Okay, this is perhaps one of the weirdest habit I’ve heard in a while. If you rewrap your head about this for a bit, like thinking if you can sleep WITH the TV on, you will sleep through anything! Just imagine what kind of sleep you will unleash when it’s quiet and dark. I also think there’s no such thing as “struggling with sleep” for decades, per se. The more accurate term is struggling with your thoughts about sleep for decades, your sleep was and still is fine all by itself. When people say they have had insomnia for years or decades, they really only have problems with their misguided, pre-conceived and often erroneous notions about sleep but the actual sleep mechanism has nothing to do with anything and is still working like clockwork. Then once people realize that their insomnia is really a mental problem and not a physiological one, their journey of gradual deconstruction and thereby recovery begins. Good luck!
One of the best indicator of insomnia recovery, is knowing when to stop doing and stop asking questions or for help. For now, I recommend you just decide what you will do when you can’t sleep, stick to a sleep window and try not to sleep or nap outside that window and then having the discipline to put into practice what you have decided to do, and not wavering in spite of facing challenges or having setbacks, which you WILL encounter. If you are able to do this, you will do quite well. As a recovered insomniac, I will tell you that the real goal isn’t really sleeping well, it’s not letting not sleeping well bother you anymore. Don’t chase sleep, let it chase you! Hope that makes sense.
Resist also the temptation to constantly research sleep or go on forums like these to ask endless questions. Give it a break, implement the strategy for a few weeks and then maybe check in and tell us how everything is going. Good luck.
Hi Frankie!
The choice whether to get out of bed and do something when you can’t sleep is really up to you. A good guideline is what did you do, when you couldn’t sleep BEFORE you have insomnia? There must have been many instances you encountered sleepless bouts in the past. Just do now what you did then, your body’s ability to sleep hasn’t changed, it’s your thoughts and ideas about sleep that have.
Imagine another scenario like this: how did you learn to walk? As a baby, did you constantly obsess about it and was anxious about making progress? Certainly, no. You learnt without any intention or meeting deadlines or constantly proving to yourself you could walk, you slowly became better at it and before you knew it, you were already walking steadily and gracefully. Well sleep is exactly like that. Achievement without intention or effort. Ask yourself: what are you trying to prove to your body when you are getting out of bed when you can’t sleep? That you CAN sleep?? So then every night becomes a relentless endeavour to prove to your mind that you can sleep and this is why this is such a struggle! Because you can’t win every time and when you don’t, you get frustrated, sad and scared that something is wrong and you need to do something about it. The lesson here is: STOP PROVING TO YOURSELF YOU CAN SLEEP, BECAUSE SLEEP IS COMPLETELY NATURAL AND EFFORTLESS, JUST LIKE BREATHING OR WALKING. You don’t keep walking just to prove to yourself you can walk in the same way you don’t need to constantly get out of bed to prove your body can sleep. Good luck.
